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Quality, Not Size, Matters

At my company, EverEffect, we believe that the success of email marketing hinges on execution in two critical areas:

The Quality of your List, the Quality of your Offer, and the Quality of your Call to Action

Getting the RightMessage to the RightAudience at the RightTime

Let’s start with your list. In Email Marketing, the quantity of people on your list matters far less than the quality of people on your list.

Case in point – EverEffect has organized a full day conference focused on interactive marketing featuring speakers from eight other companies (www.getyourMBO.com). We sent out an invitation to our email list (205); we secured another list and sent the invitation to its subscribers as well (more than 3,900).

We urge our clients not to buy or rent lists themselves, but we did so ourselves for two reasons: 1) we wanted to expand our reach to a targeted audience of online marketing professionals; and, 2) we wanted to use the exercise as an experiment to prove our point. The results are a staggering endorsement for permission-based email.

Now, the primary goal of this particular send was to have Subscribers view a video invitation to the conference. Here’s where the stats get extremely interesting. One in three EverEffect Subscribers viewed the video compared to 1 in 42 Subscribers for the much larger list!

Take another look at the numbers. The smaller list outperformed the larger one in every key performance metric: nearly 2-1 in Opens; almost 4-1 in CTR; and, 14-1 in Conversions!*

Okay, inquiring minds want to know why. It boils down to this: EverEffect’s subscriber list is permission-based; Brand X’s is pseudo-permission-based. The people on our list know who we are, and – hopefully- anticipate receiving email from us; people on the Brand X list do not have a relationship with us, and have little incentive to open an EverEffect message.

It’s pretty simple, we have less quantity (we work on that every day), and more quality than the “borrowed” list.

Yes, it takes longer, and requires more effort, to build a quality list, but the results are worth it.